Rebels Smash Holes in Libya's Internet Firewall

As anti-Qadaffi rebels gain the upper hand in the Libyan Civil War, opposition forces are managing to gain control of the Internet. Although Fast Company previously reported on Libya's attempts to block access to the Internet, ingenious activists are punching holes in the blockade.

At press time, access to social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is still blocked in Tripoli. However, other cities—both those in the liberated east and within Qadaffi-controlled areas—are managing to gain unfettered, free access to the Internet.

In what may be an indicator of the rapidly evolving political situation within Libya, Internet traffic in and out of the country climbed over the weekend.

Previously, Internet traffic volumes had been operating at 60-80% of normal as the Libyan government reportedly blocked social media and popular video sites after the start of the popular uprising on February 18th.

[...] Most Libya Internet traffic flows through the state telecom (LTT / AS21003) and then transits out of the country via three main European / Asian providers. The AS21003 network likely includes multiple datacenters and routers in several different Libyan major cities including Benghazi.

With heavy web censorship still extant in Tripoli, the nation's largest city, rebels have turned to alternate methods to access social media.

The Los Angeles Times has documented an informal network of information smugglers who sneak citizen-generated mobile phone video of attacks and important events to sympathetic Egyptians and Libyan expatriates who post them online. Many Egyptians have assisted in uploading smuggled footage of attacks, battles and riots from Libya onto YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The oasis town of Al Khufrah lies deep in the Sahara desert in the far south-east of Libya. Lying almost 1000 kilometres from its nearest sizeable neighbour, it is not somewhere foreign journalists tend to visit.
But on 23 February, news from the town reached the English-speaking world. "Greetings this is an urgent message from Kufra," said the anonymous source. "Young people have taken complete control of the city, they hoisted the flag of Libya and Gaddafi down the flag."

The message arrived by an ingenious route. It started with a voice message in Arabic left on a phone line operated by Google. Software managing the line published the message on Twitter, from where it was picked up by the website Alive in Libya. The tweet went out to Alive's army of volunteers, who provided an English translation for the site.

Other crowdsourced translation sites, such as the popular Meedan, are also playing an important role in smuggling information out of Libya.

[Image via Craig Labovitz]

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here.